Couples and Money Management

In the last month or so, JP and I have been revisiting our life goals. Since relocating and finding work, we now have a better grip on our financial situation and therefore can make better projections on our finances.

We basically wrote down our goals in order of importance and plotted them along a timeline. Our plans are quite ambitious but within the realm of possibility. We figured how much money and time we’d need to achieve each goal. It’s not that we haven’t done this before, but after going through a big transition like moving, it was good for us to check in to see whether we’re still on track. When life gets busy, it’s easy to forget your ‘why.’ If you wander too far off from your plans, your spending gets sloppy and problems arise from there. It was a good exercise in getting refocussed on what we want.

We also made adjustments to how we monitor our spending. We created a shared spreadsheet on Google that we can each access on our phones and computers. Whenever we buy something or pay a bill, we enter it on the spreadsheet. We considered using mint.com to track our spending and savings, but it can’t properly factor in all of our investment accounts where we put all of our savings. I don’t really mind having to do things more manually as it’s more interactive. Doing things this way encourages us to talk more about our expenses, which ultimately has led us to make huge improvements in our strategies.

Couples have their own ways of managing money. Some couples split every shared expense down the middle to the cent, and save and spend the rest how they see fit. Some couples rely on one spouse to do most or all of the money managing. We try to do everything together. There isn’t one right way to do this, as long as it works well.

JP and I try to account for everything. When we want to buy something extra, we pitch to the other one like it’s Dragon’s Den. This, I recognize, is not how most people want to operate! Keep in mind that we normally use up all of our savings to invest. Anything frivolous takes away from each other’s ability to buy stocks, so it better be good. We still treat ourselves, as long as we budget for it. As much as we like talking about stocks and the markets, talking about our financial logistics is just as important.

Within days of determining that one of our goals is to invest in a snowbird property within the next year, we booked ourselves to go to Costa Rica to start looking around. I love goals!

Having said all that, we both just transferred money to each of our TFSAs. We spent this morning looking for some decent picks, but we can’t find anything worth investing in this week. The only good ones were in the gold sector, but right now neither of us is interested in the goldies. The market has gone straight up for almost two months and needs to take a breather. If the market resets on the monthly or weekly charts, we might find better picks — at least we’ll be funded and ready for when the opportunity is there.

Disclaimer

Investing involves varying degrees of risk. All content on this website is for information sharing purposes only. This information is not intended to replace the advice and services of licensed professionals. When making decisions on your finances, seek the assistance of competent professionals. The author of this site assumes no risk or responsibility for the investment decisions made by users and readers.